Alpaca, cotton, ribbon and woolly stuff

Traveling in Polk County, FL, I barely made it home for Wednesday Night Knitting. We had all been busy this week! Here are some of our stories…

Ethel's purchases from Knit!

Ethel visited Knit! in Longwood last week and got some great new fibers to play with, including a soft gray alpaca with a bit of pink in it.

Ethel and Bunty

Ethel has already started on Bunty Bunny by Debbie Birkin. Meanwhile, she finished the ruffled scarf with 2 3/4 skeins
Ethel finished the dead fish hat,too–

Fishy!

Tatting too

She found some tatting paraphernalia AND a great online tutorial, so that I, too, can learn to tat like my friends already do! Some day–I’m not ready yet. I’m not worthy yet! Next on Ethel’s lengthy project list came another face cloth, which she almost finished on site.

A finished cloth, with one in progress

Tina also worked on a Sugar and Cream cotton face cloth, and almost finished it as the evening progressed. Ethel discovered that Tina can really knit without a loom, and she does so in the Continental Style. Who knew?

Tina and wash cloth

Lois modeled some of the many chapeaux she has been creating for some lucky girls she knows.

Lois and mohair beret

Elderberry beret

Ethel modeling another of Lois's hats

Lois's hat for herself

This is what Jenn finished during the week

I finally finished the Yarn Bee Fire Orange monstrosity, which was supposed to be a mindless romp into busy-ness to keep me in practice. I have plans for the orange mess–which is an orange yarn with flecks of blue, does that strike a chord with the local gator fans? I will be updating it next week. As I made my way around Polk County, I dropped in on a wonderful shop called the Yarn Basket in Winter Haven and met Elsa, the proprietor. She warmed up to me as if we’d been friends for years, and I filed away many mental notes, since I go down that way rather often to visit. Check out one of Yarn Basket’s many Youtube videos by Caysea and get an idea of the camaraderie of that place! I was intrigued by the Rozetti Tundra ribbon-like yarn and how it knits up into a ruffly confection. Elsa gave me a lesson on the spot and started me out on a scarf (which of course included another set of bamboo needles in size 8 so now I have 3 or 4 sets of size 8). The Tundra came in a skein that she said must be re-wound into a ball. “Rolled” was her term, not wound. She had this contraption that aids in winding and rolling, called a SWIFT.

Swift at Yarn Basket

She got me started, then as she breezed by to observe, called out, “Roll it! you’re winding it!” “Ooops!” It was so easy to go from rolling to winding, I didn’t even realize I had crossed a line there…

Progress on the Tundra scarf

See that little white length of yarn in the scarf? That is Elsa’s recommendation, a “lifeline” that you re-thread every 9 or so rows, so that if you have to undo, you can go back to the line that you know is correct; if you drop a stitch in the Tundra, it will unravel the whole thing.

Yarn I found in my travels

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Fun and Fishy Knitting Adventures

Wednesday was a fabulous, fun and fishy day! I went with 5 awesome kids I know (and most of their parents) to the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville after noon. It was the school-age grandkids’ last day of the year. The museum is fabulously kid-friendly. Lots of the exhibits have “hidden” drawers at the level of little ones they can pull out and see tiny collections related to the large display. One featured a woodland scene with several big fallen tree logs in the foreground which had “bark” flaps with “fungus growth” handles that the kids could open and see bugs and lizards that live just under a dead tree’s bark shelter. The kids loved looking at towering mastodon skeletons, bug displays, shells, and especially the gigantic fish jawbone display.

giant fish jawbone (taken last year)

The parents liked crawling in the cave and encouraging the youngsters to dig deeper into the interactive features. We ended in the Discovery Room, where kids can sit at tables and create art objects out of clay, or play in modules that have different themes. Afterwards we went to Applebee’s, where kids eat for $0.99 on Wednesdays! (Note, you have to have an adult who gets a regular entree for every kid who gets the $0.99). Which we did: score, score, score, score, score!

The family had barely left to go back to their homes when the knitting group members started to arrive! Ethel came with a project-in-the-making out of pom-pom yarn.

New sensation; pom-pom yarn!

Gotta get it! Perfect geometric rows for the beautiful mindset, except holding our breath to see how the binding-off will be done. Her next new project is the Dead Fish Hat originated by Thelma Egberts on the Knitty web site. Everyone is going to have to have one of these! Here’s a link for Dead Fish Hats, Alive and Knitting!, an interesting cult blog site all about Fishy–see the post where the knitters made a hat 15 times larger than the original!

You guessed itl Lois with another hat!

Lois is still working on the little animal, which she says is looking more like a sick chicken than a hamster, so she’s doing another hat in the meantime. And she picked right up on the tatting apparatus that I found in my stash. How in the world do they do it? “It’s pretty easy,” said Ethel. All right, I’ll take your word for it, ladies.

Tatting equipment

Ethel with tatting shuttle

Lisa brought baby princess and worked a wee bit more on the rose sweater, and brought along some Seven-up bread (like beer bread for teetotalers!) for a delicious snack. It has a tiniest hint of sweet lemon-lime.

yummy lemon-lime bread

Lisa and seed stitch sweater

Tina began knitting a cotton dishcloth, mostly to prove that she knows how to really knit and not just loom knit!

Tina and new project

She finished the book Sweater Quest so we all had an in-depth discussion on Adrienne Martini and Alice Starmore’s patterns. Every once in a while I check ebay to see what Starmore’s out-of-print Tudor sweater pattern book is going for. As for me, I am almost finished with the baby sweater. I switched to a different pattern I found in One Skein Wonders, which called for bulky yarn, so at the suggestion of the lady at Yarnworks, I combined the strand of Louisa Harding Kashmir DK with a variegated blue and white worsted weight yarn, the two together serving as a bulky weight. Due to carefully adhering to the suggested gauge, this sweater turned out more toddler-size. All I have to do is add buttons and block it.

the cashmere blend baby sweater

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